In 1839, President Martin Van Buren sent John Lloyd Stephens as Special Ambassador to Central America.What he found was a state of civil war, but what he found on the ground would change our view of Central American civilization forever.Although his political mission was doomed from the beginning, Stephens spent the next two years exploring the wild jungles and wilderness of Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico, visiting and recording ancient Mayan sites.Many of these Maya...

The reader of my "Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan," may remember that the researches of Mr. Catherwood and myself in the last-mentioned country were abruptly terminated by the illness of the former. During our short sojourn in Yucatan, we received vague, but, at the same time, reliable intelligence of the existence of numerous and extensive cities, desolate and in ruins which induced us to believe that the country presented a greater field for antiquarian resea...

The year is 1838. The scene is the dense Honduran forest along the Copán River. Two men, John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, are about to rediscover Mayan civilization. Their guide, slashing through the rampant growth with his machete, leads them to a structure with steps up the side, shaped like a pyramid. Next they see a stone column, fourteen feet high, sculptured on the front with a portrait of a man, “solemn, stern and well fitted to excite terror,” covered on the sides with...

INCLUDES AN EXCLUSIVE ARCHIVED RECORDING WITH PATRICK HEMINGWAY!An intimate and illuminating glimpse at Ernest Hemingway as a father, revealed through a selection of letters he and his son Patrick exchanged over the span of twenty years.In the public imagination, Ernest Hemingway looms larger than life. But the actual person behind the legend has long remained elusive. Now, his son Patrick shares the letters they exchanged over two decades,...